The style of a person's hair can be an important means of self-expression. The style of an individual's hair including length, cut, texture, and color immediately presents an image for the rest of the world to scrutinize and assess. The need for advanced hair styling techniques in order to provide persons with creative self-expressive options cannot be over stated.
Coloring is a specific hair styling treatment that can add interest and attractiveness to a person's hair. At one time, coloring or highlighting of the hair was limited to bleaching, dying, streaking and/or tinting. In recent years, coloring or highlighting of the hair have included advanced color blending and color weaving that enable the hair stylist to integrate a plurality of color into the hair, i.e., the ability to selectively color precise sections of hair.
Many techniques have been developed for treating hair, which have advantages and disadvantages and which provide varying degrees of success, depending upon the skill of the operator and other factors. There are three generally recognized methods of treating hair: cap highlighting, foiling, and the use of a transparent polymer.
In cap highlighting, a person's hair is covered with a cap made of a flexible material having a plurality of small holes. Using a small tool, the person's hair is pulled through the individual holes. Coloring of the hair then takes place on the selected hair sections. This method is subject to a number of problems. The liquid coloring often “bleeds” through the holes in the cap and the bleach or coloring spreads unevenly to strands or portions of hair not intended to be highlighted. Furthermore, pulling of the hair through the small cap holes can be uncomfortable.
Foiling involves the use of aluminum foil strips. The foil strips are folded around a section of hair to be treated together with the treating chemical or material in paste form. The foil is then folded in half, sandwiching the hair segment between the top and bottom halves The sides of the foil are then folded in an attempt to keep air away from the chemically treated hair. This procedure is repeated for each segment of hair to be highlighted. Foil highlighting is a highly used method of treating hair but suffers from a number of disadvantages. Foiling is a cumbersome and slow process. Unless the treatment is done precisely, there is a tendency for dry spots to develop due to the inability of the foil to provide an adequate seal. In addition, there is a tendency for leakage or slippage to occur due to movement of the person's head or a slip by the stylist. In addition, the stylist, due to the opaque nature of the foil material, cannot adequately observe the progress of the treatment. In addition, heat, needed to speed the chemical process, damages the hair.
In recent years, the use of a transparent polymer or other plastic has gained favor due to the stylist's ability to better monitor the hair coloring chemical process. One such prior art method uses a transparent plastic with a thickness of approximately 0.050 mm. Such plastic does not effectuate an optimal seal to contain the chemical additive placed on the hair to be treated. Such plastic is heavy, cannot be folded or rolled, and may slip due to the combined weight of the plastic, chemical additive, and hair, resulting in the undesirable mixing of chemicals. Furthermore, with such thickness of plastic in place the stylist is unable to cut the hair, thereby prohibiting a precision high-level styling of the person's hair.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method to selectively treat and/or style precise sections of hair that is more efficient, highly effective, reliable, and cost effective than known methods.